The first ever Starboard Festival has launched in Brighton

Posted on 5th Jul 2016
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Starboard Festival launched with some fantastic performances this weekend. Audiences gave rave reviews for the Pauline Quirke Academy’s first ever performance of Piratanical, Second Hand Dance’s superb show, Grass and Al Start from Go Kid Music had all the kids on stage dancing!

This week we have lots for everyone to enjoy. We’ve got performances by the Academy of Creative Training and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama about being a young person in 2016.

After school on Wednesday and Thursday we’ve got Danny Champion of the World, which is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Tickets are selling fast! Get yours here.

And on Friday, thanks to their friends at The Old Market, they welcome the Youth Team of Poets Versus MCs to Starboard for a battle to prove who has got the tightest rhetoric and the wildest imaginations. You can get your tickets for Poets Vs MCs here.

We’re so proud to have been able to programme work BY children and young people alongside work that has been created for them. We think it’s really important for children and young people to have the experience of performing on stage. That is why Starboard Festival is supporting the campaign to reform the English Baccalaureate to ensure that drama and expressive arts remain in the national curriculum.

Parliament is holding a debate about changes to creativity in schools. Participation in drama and the performing arts is falling across the country, and schools and colleges are cutting courses once popular.

With the narrowing of the curriculum, which at best diminishes the importance of and at worst excludes the expressive arts, we should all be worried. The arts enable us to explore what it is to be human, making sense of our emotional lives, using our whole selves.

These kinds of experiences are vital in schools. If you want to express your concern about this you can email your MP here.

At Starboard Festival, they believe that they are as important as any other subject and should be valued as such in the education system.

The team at Starboard are currently hatching exciting plans for Starboard Festival next year, talking to schools and colleges across the city about enabling more children and young people to perform and watch brilliant performances during the festival in 2017 and beyond.

Hope to see you up at the Brighton Open Air Theatre for some more Starboard Festival magic in the sun this week. Come and say hello!